Cor! They were THIS big!So Jack Straw draws on the age-old slur regarding men of colour and white women, with the accusation that "some British Pakistani men regard white girls as 'easy meat' for sexual abuse".
I believe this was also the chief fantasy of the Ku Klux Klan when they lynched black men in the Deep South during the days of Jim Crow.
Funny how we are dehumanising Pakistani males at the same time as we are blowing innocent Pakistani people to smithereens in their own homeland with drones, one of the most cowardly forms of military killing machine ever devised. What a fortuitous bit of mind-frakking.
Rather than deal with the breakdown of our society as the rich suck up all the remaining wealth, and having an honest look at how the resulting stresses affect human relations, we demonise an entire race group. Is Straw seriously saying that these men would never have targeted non-white girls? That white men don't traffic and abuse women?
Doesn't any group of males from a background where religious morality sets the standards for behaviour tend to have screwed up attitudes towards women? It manifests in differing ways but there are parallels, the common factors being a sense of ownership of women's sexuality.
Far from being dangerous, I remember the wave of Bangladeshi men who migrated to the East End in the 1970s as being kind to kids, presumably because they missed their own children back home or had yet to have their own families. It was they who were in harm's way, beaten and abused by skinhead gangs who shared the views of swathes of the media and the odd MP.
The Guardian reports:
The judge in the case said he did not believe the crimes were "racially aggravated", adding that the race of the victims and their abusers was "coincidental".
But Jack knows better. Who can guess what this creepy man harbours in the deepest recesses of his imagination? Er, oh we do now.
Some actual research here. Hat tip MartinJJB
Jack Straw at a prison near you